A seductive product description can mean the difference between moving units and watching your inventory decompose. If a potential customer is not convinced to purchase after reading your product description, you have some work to do. Here are some crucial ingredients for writing great product descriptions for your online store.

1) Base your descriptions on your customer types.

Before you can hope to sell your products, you must learn your customers. One of the most effective ways to improve your product descriptions is to gear them towards individual buyer personas that you have previously researched. The buyer persona helps to quantify the behaviors of your prospects and customers, giving you more of an opportunity to compose great product descriptions that will actually be effective.

For example, knowing that previous customers enjoy your products because of their durability may encourage you to use language that refers to product longevity in your descriptors. However, if your loyal customers are more interested in product upgrades, you can compose a different product description for that audience that includes the new features in the upcoming iteration.

2) Don’t talk features, translate features into benefits.

Features and benefits may sound similar, but they are actually quite different in application. Features are the aspects of your products that get your techies excited. However, the average customer may not even know what to do with an “upgraded tensile structure and 4 x 4 overlay.” You may need to inform this customer that this feature will “improve their ability to drive more efficiently off-road.”

What problems does your product take away? How does your product make people’s lives better? If you tell people what’s in it for them, rather than just what’s in it, your product descriptions will likely gain a great deal more traction.

3) Like it or not, the way you say things is just as important as what you are saying.

The tone of voice that you use in your product descriptions will make a huge difference in the way those descriptions are perceived by your audience. Marketing to the modern consumer means that you want to meet at eye level. There is nothing worse than sounding like a big corporation that is mass marketing a product. Even if you are scaling, you want to sound like the provider down the street.

Your tone can also enlighten customers about your company culture. Millennials especially are very cautious about the companies they choose to patronize. They have so many choices that they can afford to forgo a product from a company they perceive as environmentally unconscious or socially disconnected. Let the personality of your company flow through your product descriptions to separate your sales techniques from those of your competitors.

Writing great product descriptions is a key part of any successful online business!

4) Make sure that you are using a readable font.

The attention span of the average human being is down – way down. Research has concluded that most people read less than 20% of any given web page. If you give people any reason to read less, they will.

Some of the most effective techniques for product descriptions is to make the subheading slightly larger than the body text; use an easily readable, common font for the body text; and make judicious use of bold and colored text to draw attention to points that are especially important.

Bullet points are also an incredibly effective way to grab one’s attention. However, do not forget to use plenty of white space as well. Give the eye a rest so that it can take in the next point.

5) Consider your biggest customer – the major search engines.

No, the search engines themselves are not going to purchase your products. However, they control 90% of all Internet traffic. You should look at Google, Yahoo and Bing as three big customers that you will need to please on a daily basis. At the same time, do not try to game the system. The days of overloading product descriptions with keywords to gain a boost in search engine rankings are long gone.

The most effective techniques for optimizing product description text all come back to the same thing – good writing. As long as you have one or two key phrases to focus your content around, the rest of your content should flow naturally and appeal to human eyes. Make sure that you optimize the images of your product with your key phrases and use the key phrase in notable portions of your text, including the subheading and any bolded phrasing.

6) The most important ingredient for your descriptions:

The market is always changing, and your product descriptions must change as well. The most important ingredient for a great product description is adaptability.

Take note of stand out phrases that may be working for your competitors. Take a look at search engine rankings to see what is working in your market. Most importantly, listen to your customers on social media and on industry message boards. More often than not, you will gain some insight directly from your prospects as to what they want your product description to look like.

There is no single technique that will make your product descriptions go from zero to hero overnight. All of the techniques mentioned above work in tandem to improve visibility and readability. If you constantly improve your product descriptions based on the needs of your customers, your online store will have a greater chance of moving that inventory.

Do you have comments or questions about writing great product descriptions? Let us know in the comments below!

Guest author Reuben Yonatan is the founder and CEO of GetCRM, a trusted comparison resource that helps companies understand and choose a CRM solution for their specific needs. With a 10-year track record in building, growing and strategically shaping operational functionality in all his ventures, Reuben helps small business owners align strategy with culture and improve overall company infrastructure.